Benjamin Lay

This print depicts Benjamin Lay, a radical Quaker abolitionist, standing outside of a cave while holding a book. Henry Dawkins engraved this portrait of Lay after a painting by William Williams and his apprentice Benjamin West. Deborah Franklin likely commissioned the original as a present to her husband, Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a friend of Lay’s and published Lay’s abolitionist book, “The Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates” (1738).

Lay, born in Colchester, Essex in 1681, was a Quaker zealot who was eventually disowned by his Quaker Meeting in England. He came to Philadelphia in 1732, but his reputation as an agitator, mainly due to his opposition to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, prevented his membership in a Philadelphia meeting. Lay staged public, theatrical protests aimed to shame slave-owning Quakers and argue that slavery and Quakerism were incompatible. For example, in 1738, Lay orchestrated a protest at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in Burlington, New Jersey where he plunged a sword into a book rigged with fake blood and sprinkled the blood onto slave-owning Quakers.

Lay was a dwarf, four feet eleven inches tall and lived in a cave-like dwelling just outside Philadelphia in Abington. Lay championed a Cynic philosophy that called for drinking only water, wearing simple clothes, eating only fruits and vegetables, and traveling long distances on foot. Williams’ painting referenced these ideals with a basket of fruit and vegetables, a cane, and simple garments. Lay holds a book, “Trion on Happiness,” which alludes to philosopher Thomas Tyron’s 1683 book “The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness.” Lay frequently carried the book with him and subscribed to Tyron’s ideas about the immorality of killing animals. The print vaguely references the “Redicule of the Ignorant” that Lay experienced as backlash to his abolitionist work.

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